Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes

Walker Art Center, February 16 - August 17, 2008

Carnegie Museum of Art, October 4, 2008 - January 18, 2009

Yale School of Architecture March 2 - May 10, 2009

Because suburbia occupies a dominant presence in so many lives—a place of not only residence but also of work, commerce, worship, education, and leisure—it has become a focal point for competing interests and viewpoints. The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. more

Artists

Andrew Bush

American, b. 1957, St. Louis, Missouri; lives and works in Los Angeles

From early on in his practice, Andrew Bush has been interested in photographing people in quiet stillness and letting the objects that surround them subtly tell their story. His first series, which began as his master’s thesis at Yale University in the early 1980s, consisted of large-format color pictures of Bonnettstown Hall, where an Irish family that he met while traveling in Europe had lived for generations. Although only peripheral details of the house were shown, such as the thermostat or a lamp cord, the residents’ presence could be seen in the worn markings throughout the home. When the artist moved to Los Angeles in 1985, he began a new series of Vector Portraits, close-ups of drivers on Southwest freeways framed by their car windows and the surrounding landscape. The pictures were taken between 1985 and 1998 using photographic equipment mounted to the passenger side of Bush’s car, which allowed him to take in-focus pictures while traveling fifty to seventy miles per hour. For the most part, the subjects are engrossed in their driving and alone in their vehicles. The resulting images provide an intimate view of a very public act. Bush’s work is in the collection of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Original Submission Call

Do you live in a suburb?
Do you work or go to school in one?
What is your experience of the “burbs? ”…

Whether you love them or hate them we’re interested in your thoughts on the phenomenon of the American suburb. We invite you to make a 5-minute video about strip malls, cul-de-sacs, office parks, and green lawns or whatever suburbia means to you. A select number of videos will be chosen to screen as part of the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes in the Target Gallery from February 15 to May 18, 2008.

To participate, upload your video to YouTube and add the tag “walkerworldsaway” or post it as a response to our video above. We’ll feature all videos on the Walker’s YouTube page. To be considered for gallery screening, entries must be 5 minutes or less and be online by January 18, 2008.